Let us suppose that there are sentient beings somewhat like ourselves (with whatever degree of sentience we have) on a planet circling a relatively nearby star, perhaps Tau Ceti. For some reason, these beings decide to visit us and launch a rocket ship (or flying saucer) towards us with a select group of space travelers on board.
If they travel with a top speed of the fastest space vehicle Earth engineers have themselves launched in various directions, the one-way trip to Earth from Tau Ceti would take approximately 50,000 years. This is because although Tau Ceti is 11 light years away from us, light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second, a speed which we can barely consider, let alone achieve.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Thousands of UFO sightings are reported each year. Throughout this book, examples of actual, unedited letters from UFO witnesses will show how the phenomenon is observed and how it its interpreted. In all cases, the names of witnesses have been removed for their privacy.
Talkeetna, Alaska December 21, 1994
I sat in the outhouse about midnight with the front opening to the northwest. I looked up about due north and saw bright strobes of red and green, thinking it was a jet en route from Anchorage to Fairbanks. (Talkeetna is in the Anchorage-Fairbanks air corridor.) I looked up again and the lights had not moved any appreciable distance like jets do. I noticed that one of the blinking lights appeared to be purple and blue, unlike any aircraft markings. The lights appeared about 40 degrees off the horizon almost due north and did not appear to move. The strobes were quite bright for what seemed to be an object quite far away.
My wife joined me in the observation and saw the same red, green and blue strobe-type lights, but did not see purple. I put the binoculars on the lights and could make out no shape, but the colored light flashes appeared to come from the top and bottom. I got out my daughters telescope and tried to find the object but only found a luminescent sphere somewhat like the moon except without dark areas. Since it was near zero with a bit of wind, I had trouble stabilizing this small telescope, and am not sure I focused on the object I saw with the binoculars. I did not see any other bright objects in that part of the sky.
We continued to observe the colorful strobe lights for more than an hour and a half, during which time it travelled a few degrees to the east and became increasingly distant. I’ve observed planes and satellites, but never anything like this. The night was so clear that anyone for many miles around could have observed the same thing.
I spoke about it on the radio to a neighbor a few miles away the following night, and she said she had seen a similar thing about this time of year some years ago. There are military operation areas nearby, and maybe there is some sort of super slow satellite or some extremely high helicopter, but I am curious to know what it might have been.
Reported by Anonymous
Source: Ufology Research
It would be a long voyage, even if the Tau Cetians are placed in some sort of cryogenic suspension or stasis, or if they are extremely long-lived. There is no guarantee that their equipment would continue to function properly over such a long period of time. Not only that, as they travel, their home planet and the Earth itself will age in normal time; drastic geological and biological changes will occur in the course of 50,000 years. We (or their kin) may not be here. Our technology and society may have advanced to an unbelievable level, or perhaps not.
It is the technology that may be the important factor. A possible scenario would be the following:
IF their star began its planet-forming process before our own sun did, then they may very well be far in advance of us technologically; and
IF they are more advanced than us, they may have been able to design spacecraft that can attain velocities far in excess of our own capabilities, perhaps even speeds a significant fraction of light; and
IF they can obtain such velocities, then a 50,000 year journey could be condensed into a much shorter time span, perhaps only a few years or months; and
IF they decided that a trip was warranted, they might choose to visit Earth; then
IF they are visiting us, their means of transportation here could be observed by us as UFOs.
DID YOU KNOW?
The Outer Space Treaty, drafted by the United Nations in 1967 and signed by the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union, holds that if any extraterrestrial life is discovered, the secretary-general of the U.N. must be notified. (Part Two, Section A, Article 5, Point 3.)
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the name of scientific studies of distant objects in the universe in the expectation that extraterrestrial life exists and can be detected. Some SETI projects search for electromagnetic transmissions like radio signals from civilizations on distant planets, while others are more passive and involve the search for extrasolar planets. Some SETI projects have been government funded, while others, especially recent research, have been primarily funded by private sources.
In 1960, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake used a radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, to examine the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for radio signals that might be from alien civilizations. His experiment was called “Project Ozma,” after the Queen of Oz in L. Frank Baum’s books about the Wizard of Oz. However, Drake did not detect anything out of the ordinary.
10 REPORTED SHAPES OF UFOS
1. Saucer
2. Sphere
3. Cigar
4. Egg
5. Boomerang
6. Triangle
7. “Fuzzy”
8. Fireball
9. Starlike
10. Blob
In 1971, NASA funded a program called Project Cyclops that proposed the construction of hundreds of small radio telescopes linked together so that they could act as one huge eye to look for signals from other civilizations in the galaxy. It was never built, largely because the price tag in the 1970s was more than $10 billion.
In 1974, an experiment at the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico sent a signal into space towards the globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, about 25,000 light years from Earth. The signal contained a detailed message from we Earthlings, giving our location in the Solar System, information on our planet, and what we look like. Of course, since the message will take 25,000 years to reach its destination, even if aliens there received our message and replied right away, we wouldn’t know for another 50,000 years!
The 1970s saw many astronomers scanning the skies for possible indications of life in the universe. And, in 1977, something remarkable may have been detected. On August 15, a researcher monitoring space for radio signals using the Big Ear radio telescope of Ohio State University noticed a strange signal that was not manmade. It was called the “Wow!” signal because it may have been from aliens across the galaxy! Wow!
Other SETI programs have included SERENDIP, META and BETA, each becoming more and more efficient and powerful at scanning